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Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2012 23:18:37 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] re: removing an item from an array
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrew Faulds)

On 17/08/12 22:41, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> On 08/17/2012 05:35 PM, Rasmus Schultz wrote:
>> Most other languages have more than one collection-type... since PHP has
>> only the single, hybrid array-type which acts both as a hash and as an
>> array, something like this ought to be available.
>>
>> I don't know why everyone is so eager to jump up and argue against
>> something this simple, basic and useful. The fact that this is missing
>> is an oversight - just look at the number of solutions people come up
>> with. For what?
>>
>> I want to remove and object from a list. Not an exotic and crazy
>> requirement, is it? It just isn't the sort of thing that should require
>> any substantial thinking or typing.
>>
>> And it doesn't help make codebases more legible when people come up with
>> 25 different ways to do it.
> The problem is that it is a rather unusual thing to do. I don't mean
> removing an element, that is very common, but you are implying that you
> know you don't have duplicates and you want a fast way to remove an
> element by value in that case. To me that means you built your array
> badly. If the values are unique then they should be the keys, or at
> least a representation of the value should be the key such that you
> don't need to scan the entire hash for the element when you need to
> access it. And removal is just like any other access.
>
> -Rasmus
>
>
Hmm. I can think of a particular instance I've needed to remove an item 
from an array by value, and where keys wouldn't be an option. In PHP you 
can only have string or int keys, you can't have object keys. In Python, 
I've used Twisted (an excellent asynchronous OOP networking framework) 
to write client-server applications. One thing I did was maintain a list 
of clients (that is, a Python list). When a client disconnected, I would 
do list.remove(client). Of course there might be better ways to 
implement this, but it was simple and worked. Anything wrong with 
allowing the same in PHP?

-- 
Andrew Faulds
http://ajf.me/